UIA is working on a redundant upstream circuit for Helendale.

Helendale is located in a remote and beautiful place. As such, there isn’t a lot of infrastructure that exists as you might find in more metropolitan areas. There is, in fact, only one choice for us for upstream providers in the area, and that is Frontier. Our upstream is a 10 Gig circuit from Frontier which is all Fiber. Normally Fiber is solid but it is still susceptible to outages from equipment failure, and perhaps someone hitting a pole that has our Fiber on it, for example. The circuit has worked well for 2 and a half years, but having just one circuit is no longer viable.

In the last case of our outage, on February 22nd, it was Frontier equipment failure. It should have taken 2 hours or so to fix it, but Frontier did not have any equipment available at the time. Frontier is a mismanaged company, and in fact they are about to file bankruptcy and their stock is less than a dollar. Bankruptcy does not mean the circuit will cease, it just means that they are running thin on the right people and equipment as they try to figure out how to reorganize.

Our plan is to build a new Fiber circuit to Adelanto where we can get upstream from another provider. This means laying down 15 miles of our own Fiber. Having dual connectivity to Helendale will fix any issues that one circuit may have from time to time.

It will be expensive, but UIA is determined to provide Helendale with the service it deserves.

—Wes Zuber, President, Ultimate Internet Access, Inc